L.A. Mental (22 page)

Fifty-Seven

T
he gunshots started within seconds, muffled
whump
s at quickly spaced intervals, but by then we'd made it to the nearest trees and Cynthia was on the other side of the pond, a good sixty yards away. Even so, she didn't miss by much—the bullets crashed through the branches around us, and one blew a chunk out of a pine trunk so close I felt bits of bark sting my face.

Then the shooting stopped. She was coming after us.

We had the head start, and I knew the turf, but Cynthia was going to move a lot faster than me carrying Lisa. We had to disappear.

I ran on to a place where the stream was only calf deep and cut sharply across it, then along the base of the cliffs to a deer trail that led up a ravine. It was just a track, barely visible even in daylight, and the rushing water covered the sound of my footsteps as I scrambled up it. After a hundred feet, I stopped and collapsed, panting, behind a rock outcropping. If Cynthia hadn't caught sight of us, we still had a chance.

Lisa was starting to stir, and her eyes had gone from glazed to scared and confused. Her mouth opened like she was trying to speak. I touched my forefinger to her lips—the sound of a human voice would carry far more than footsteps.

“Not a peep,” I whispered into her ear. “You understand?” Her eyes stayed wide, but she gave me a tiny, tentative nod.

Voices carried, all right. Cynthia's cut through the night air like a whip.

“I know exactly where you are! If you try to run again, you won't get three steps.”

My body jerked, and I felt Lisa shudder, too. My arms tightened around her. It sounded like Cynthia was still on the other side of the stream, but I couldn't be sure.

“Don't make things any worse than they already are,” she called. “Come out. We'll get this over with—quick, painless, and that's the end of it. But if you drag it out longer, I'm going to get very angry. You
know
what that means for your family.”

Very, very slowly, I eased my face to the edge of the outcropping until I could get a glimpse down to the streambed. Long seconds passed before I could see her, a shadow moving stealthily along the opposite bank—a single measured step at a time, holding the pistol outstretched in front of her with both hands, sweeping it in a searching arc.

But still searching. My eyes closed briefly in thanks—to whom or what, I wasn't sure.

I eased back to look at Lisa and gave her the
all okay
sign with my circled thumb and forefinger. She answered with another tiny nod, but it was firmer this time, and her eyes told me that she was starting to grasp what was going on.

We stayed as still as the rock that hid us while Cynthia worked her way upstream. She was silent for the next couple of minutes, then called out her threat again, her voice now muffled by the water.

It was time to move. She was bound to realize that we couldn't have made it much farther and start coming back.

Lisa was still too unsteady to climb up the steep, rough trail, so I gave her a whispered apology and carried her the rest of the way slung over my shoulder, uncomfortable for her but easier on me and leaving me a hand free to help pull us along. Fear and adrenaline gave me the strength to make it, but barely. When we got to the cliff top, I was so drained I thought I might pass out. I unloaded her onto the ground as gently as I could, then half fell down beside her and pulled her close again. My clothes were still sodden, and I'd gotten her wet, too, but I was giving off heat like a furnace and she was cold from inaction. Next step was to get her moving on her own, as soon as I could get myself up off the ground.

“Do you remember what happened?” I murmured to her.

Her voice was weak and halting, but it still managed to convey sheer feminine outrage.

“She had a gun. Made me come here with her. Made me drink a roofie. Then I went blank. That
bitch
.”

Despite how insane and terrifying it all was, my lips actually curved in a smile of relief. Lisa was still Lisa, coming right back and fighting mad.

“Can you walk?” I said.

“I think so. I might need some help to start.”

I got us both to our feet, then steadied her while we paced around for a minute or so. When she seemed okay, I told her to keep going and went to the cliff edge, staring down at the dark valley floor and trying to figure out what to do next. I wanted to keep moving; I didn't think Cynthia would look for us up here, but I couldn't be sure and there might be wild cards in the mix, like Venner or other accomplices who would join the search. The nearest phone was at a neighboring ranch, a good four miles away over the rugged mountain terrain. It would be tough on Lisa, but it looked like our best bet.

Then a sound erupted into the quiet night—the throaty roar of a high-powered motorcycle starting up. I'd heard it before.

Cynthia's motorcycle.

The bike was already moving fast when the headlight flicked on, a tiny glow like a shooting star, and it kept gaining speed as it headed up over the ridgetop toward the highway.

She could make it to L.A.—and to my mother and sister—in an hour.

Now I needed a phone fast.

Fifty-Eight

W
e still couldn't risk going back down to the Lodge; she had probably cut the landline and taken my cell phone from my car, anyway. But my gaze stayed on the city set. If the security system was breached, it would instantly alert a central office, and they would dispatch sheriff's deputies. It would take more than lobbing rocks at the fence—the sensors would be set to ignore minor bumps like small animals brushing against it. But a big animal—like a man—would do the trick, and the cameras would pick me up, too.

And if Venner was down there waiting, or Cynthia had dumped the bike and come back on foot, so would they.

I strode over to Lisa. She was looking better, her walking stronger and more controlled.

“I've got to go take care of something,” I said. “Don't worry. I'll be back in twenty minutes. But just in case I'm not, you've got to get out of here. Start walking that way.” I pointed northeast. “Stay up here on high ground and follow the stream, you can see it below. After a few miles you'll come to a ranch. It's a rough hike, but be careful and you'll do fine.”

There was no describing the look she gave me.

“Okay, Tom,” she said, “but promise me one thing. Don't ever say ‘Don't worry' to me again.”

It had probably taken fifteen minutes to climb the trail carrying Lisa. Going back down alone took three or four. I crossed the stream and trotted quietly through the woods to the rear of the film set. At the tree line, I crouched to watch and listen for anyone moving. There was nothing—yet, anyway.

I took off in a sprint for the chain-link fence and jumped up onto it, shaking it furiously like an enraged ape in a cage. The entire area lit up instantly with powerful floodlights, along with a shrieking
wheep wheep wheep
like a megadecibel smoke detector. I waved furiously at the nearest camera, a beckoning
get the hell over here
gesture. Then I dropped to the ground and raced back to the woods, zigzagging like a broken field runner. This time I went right on past the deer trail—if somebody was following, I wasn't going to lead them to Lisa—and kept going another few hundred yards before I hid again to watch.

Mercifully, it looked like the area was clear. I gave it another ten minutes to be safe, then climbed a different trail back to the cliff top. Only a few minutes later, we saw the first flashing red and blue lights in the distance, coming our way fast.

The deputy was on the scene and starting to search the area, pistol in hand, by the time we got to him. He assumed, understandably, that we were the ones who should be arrested, and it took some fast talking to keep us from getting cuffed and thrown into his car. But he smoothed out when he realized who Lisa was—and he started taking our story a lot more seriously when I led him to the pond and showed him where I guessed Dustin Sperry's body would be, trapped by currents against the base of the dam.

The deputy's flashlight beam was powerful enough to pierce to the bottom and pick out the pale face and sodden shape, moving with eerie gentleness as the currents tugged him this way and that.

He got on his radio, calling for backup, arranging for L.A. cops to escort my mother and sister to a hotel—and putting out an APB for Cynthia Trask. Within a very short time, there were a lot of law enforcement agents looking for her.

But by morning, it was becoming clear that she had vanished.

Epilogue

T
he summer faded into autumn, and the madness faded with it until, at least outwardly, things seemed pretty much back to normal. Lisa and I had been seeing each other steadily; we kept our separate lives, and she was working on another film, but we usually spent the weekends together and a couple of nights in between.

My mother seemed to be fine; Erica was married; Paul was home being a husband and father again. Hap had finally checked in from Singapore, sending a short note that was outwardly an apology for his abrupt departure, but was really testing the waters to see how much trouble he was in. My mother hadn't answered, and I didn't know if she ever would. I still hadn't heard from Drabyak.

One evening in November, Lisa and I took a drive up to my family's Malibu property. It had recently been put up for sale, so this was probably my last visit there, but there was no sentimentalism involved. I could have done without ever seeing the place again. It brought back all the pain about Nick, the more so because Nick was gone.

Our mother and I had made the decision to take him off life support at the end of August, when it was clear that he was already dead in all the ways that mattered. I couldn't really articulate this, but I knew that Audrey felt the same—what it came down to more than anything else was dignity.

It was Lisa who'd suggested that she and I come to the Malibu house while we still had the chance. By now she knew the whole story, and she wanted to walk around the property—where, in an important way, the events had started—and see if any impressions filtered into her mind. She had kept that door firmly shut over these past months; the last thing either of us wanted was more weirdness inside our heads. But as the immediate nightmare had eased off, our need had grown to try to make sense of it.

Especially because we had good reason to believe that it was still going on, hidden, around us.

We got to Malibu as the last daylight streaked the horizon and the long electric arc of the coastline was coming aglow. I pulled the Land Cruiser in through the security gate and parked beside the boarded-up old house. Paul no longer had any claim to it. Auditors were still looking into how much family money he had siphoned off into Parallax, but it was on the order of several million, and we had taken back this property as restitution. It would go on the market soon, and whoever bought it wouldn't waste any time tearing the house down. But right now everything looked the same as when I'd come here for him that night last May.

“Sure you're okay with this?” I asked Lisa. She nodded. Most likely nothing would even happen; as she'd told me before, she couldn't control her ability, only invite it. Still, we were both nervous, feeling that maybe this was a sleeping dog we should let lie.

“Let me wander a little, try to tune in,” she said. “Then show me where you and Nick were.”

We got out of the car and started walking; I kept pace with her but stayed out of her way. She moved slowly, arms folded and head bowed; although she was wearing dark jeans and a hoodie, there was the sense of a gothic heroine on a bleak moor, mourning a lost lover or brooding over the sin that had brought her to ruin. Gradually, we worked our way toward the cliff edge and then to where Nick and I had tangled. The gouge where the chunk of earth had broken off under my foot still stood out like a fresh scar.

It was an eerie feeling, being at this place again.

“He was standing right about here,” I said, tapping the ground with my toe.

Lisa came over and turned seaward. We stood there unmoving, with the wet salty breeze in our faces and the mesmerizing pulse of the surf in our ears.

Then she said quietly, “It's like—there's something that's keeping tabs on us. Sort of hovering, waiting to make a move.”

“Cynthia?” It was the thought we dreaded most—that she was still very much a threat to us, and she'd only been biding her time until she was safe in a new life.

“Maybe—I can't tell,” Lisa said, looking wary, “but I think we're going to find out.”

It was only an impression, she was clear about that; she could have subconsciously manufactured it from anxiety, of which we both had plenty.

But it didn't exactly lighten the mood. We walked back to the car and started home.

T
here had been a media circus after Dustin Sperry's death, of course, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it would have been under other circumstances. Right away, the same spectral agent types as Venner stepped in—although he himself was conspicuously missing. They grilled Lisa and me, but very little information was publicly released; they forbade us to talk to the press and came down on any of them who got pushy. No doubt there was more of that pressure from other sources behind the scenes—the secret, influential Parallax members who wanted no part of being associated with this. The story died out of the mainstream with surprising speed; even the paparazzi and tabloids that targeted Lisa backed off.

We didn't find out much from the spooks in return. Cynthia and Venner had disappeared. If they ever got caught, we'd probably never know it. The sense we got was that he was a rogue American agent who'd compromised and endangered his colleagues—about as popular with these people as a plague-infected rat—and we'd be wise to forget he'd ever existed. Cynthia was more of a cipher, with her history concealed by a careful smoke screen; the hint of her Russian origin was tantalizing. It seemed likely that they'd left the country and they might or might not still be working as a team. My own guess was that Venner had found out he was just as expendable as everyone else to her, and by now “they” were down to just “she.”

There were still people looking for her, but there wasn't much doubt that she would sell the mind-control nanotechnology—probably already had—and not just for money but for security, the protection of a foreign government or powerful private interests. With that kind of a safety net, she'd have plenty of time and opportunity to take revenge on us. In that case, our best hope was that she didn't want it badly enough to go to the trouble.

I
n any event, the nanotech horse was out of the barn, and it was bound to be ridden hard—by whom, for what purposes, and to what effects, were the questions. With that on our minds, Lisa and I had started noticing bizarre news items that we hadn't before.

Sheer paranoia on my part? Sure. Most likely they were random and unrelated, the result of real mental disturbance, drugs, or too long a time in some psychological pressure cooker. Or
was
somebody still using the nanotech?

There's something starting up that we're going to see more of, and we might be looking at a real problem,
Drabyak had said.

But Parallax had essentially vaporized. The production company had closed its doors, the movie remained unfinished, and there were no signs of the organization itself—but there were people with a lot at stake. Would they just walk away quietly, or were Lisa and I particular threats because of what we knew? Was somebody only waiting for the right opportunity to arrange an accident?

The nanos were in our brains to stay. If anyone knew of any way for us to shield ourselves, they weren't saying so. Trying to hide out seemed as unrealistic, and futile, as ever. And besides being vulnerable ourselves, someone who wanted to target us could easily set up a situation to zap a total stranger or even an animal into sudden hostility—and themselves never be suspected of having anything to do with it. Every time Lisa or I glimpsed a menacing face, heard a dog burst into sudden furious barking, saw a vehicle in the rearview mirror coming up fast, we got a sickening jolt of fear.

I knew this was edging into “careful what you wish for” turf, but a part of me had started thinking that if somebody was going to come after us, then for Christ's sake, let's get it over with.

I
woke up out of a dream with my cell phone ringing. The clock read 3:17 a.m.—the exact same time as when Nick had called that night last May. This time I couldn't remember the dream—it was only a jumble of images—and Lisa was beside me. But the sense of déjà vu was still all over this.

I grabbed the phone off the bedside table and strode out of the room, raising it to my ear as I went—waking up fast.

“Hello, Tom. Don't hang up,” the caller said. I didn't recognize the voice—it was male. It sounded somehow disembodied, like it might have been digitally modified.

“All right,” I said hoarsely.

“You need to answer a question, and be very honest. Let's start by refreshing your memory.”

Then it came—that ugly wrenching twist inside my head, like millions of insects suddenly coming to life and writhing around.

I staggered, but I managed to hang on to the phone instead of throwing it like everything in me wanted to do. After a few seconds, the sensation eased off. I tried to calm my gasping breath, then slowly raised the phone to my ear again.

“Still there?” the voice said calmly.

“Yes.”

“Good. Here's the question. On the night you were almost killed—when you were in the water, fighting for your life—you got bombarded with those same kinds of signals. But you blocked them. How did you do it?”

“
I
didn't do it,” I said. “It just happened.”

“That's not really an answer, now is it?”

I clenched the phone tighter in my sweaty palm, expecting another searing prod to my memory. But the eerie calm remained steady, and I groped for the right thing to say.

I'd spent endless hours thinking about that particular mystifying part of the overall madness. The only semirational explanation I could come up with was that my brain had somehow manufactured a defense for those few seconds of extreme duress—a sort of neural brownout that was the product of terror, adrenaline, and the need for instant self-preserving action. My subconscious, working in its own bizarre ways, had linked that to the suggestion of “Gatekeepers” that Kelso had implanted in me.

But that edged into the realm of a “rational” explanation weaker than the irrational one, however wild it might be:

That the Gatekeepers really had stepped in to save me.

I inhaled deeply and let the words go. “Maybe something protected me. A power from outside myself.”

“Very interesting,” the voice mused. “Did you summon this consciously?”

“No. I never even imagined it could happen until it was over.”

“Could you do it again?”

“If I could, I'd be doing it right now.”

I thought I heard a hint of laughter.

“Why did they help you, do you think?” the voice said.

“I don't know. I sure didn't do anything to deserve it. Maybe it wasn't about me at all—they had a completely different reason, and I was just in the middle of it. Or maybe—” I hesitated.

“Maybe because they have another use for you in the future? A fiercer beast to throw you to?”

I sagged. “Yeah.”

“An excellent guess. What will you do about it? Just wait and hope?”

“What else am I
supposed
to do?”

“Remember that Gatekeepers guard gates,” the voice said, still maddeningly calm. “Find those and smash through them. There'll be beasts at each one, and they'll tear into you—but you'll learn to bite back.”

It was sinking in that, bizarre as this had started out, the turn it was taking was far more so.

“How do I find the gates?” I said. “I don't even know what they are.”

“You've been given eyes that see. If you're fool enough not to use them, then fool you remain.”

And that was it. I was left standing there in the dark, holding a silent phone.

Then I realized that Lisa was watching me from the bedroom doorway, with her hands pressed flat against the jambs like she was bracing herself for support.

“Are you done?” she said, in not much more than a whisper.

I nodded shakily. “I don't know who it was. Maybe Cynthia, fucking with me. Maybe somebody else. I—I don't know.”

Lisa came forward and put her fingertips against my chest, a light, soothing touch.

“Tom. It wasn't anybody,” she said, still speaking very quietly.

“It—
What?
”

“I was awake the whole time. The way you grabbed for the phone and rushed out here—it seemed so strange, that was why I followed you. The phone never rang. The line was dead. No voice coming from the other end—nothing.”

I stared at her. “I
heard
it ring. That's what woke me up.”

She shook her head gently. “Sorry, hon. You must have dreamed that.”

“I know I wasn't dreaming that I heard somebody talking back.”

“Here, let's check.” She pried the phone from my numb hand, brought up the received calls list, and held it up for me to see.

The last one had come from Lisa herself at 4:53 in the afternoon, as she was leaving her house to drive over here.

I dropped down to one knee, then the other, then fell sideways on the floor and rolled over flat onto my back. She stretched out beside me, propped up on an elbow.

“You think you're losing it?” she murmured.

“When you talk out loud to somebody who's not there, but you're sure they
are
there, that's a pretty fair sign.”

“You didn't sound crazy at all, Tom. I mean, you weren't ranting or anything—it's like you
were
talking to somebody. So what did they say?”

I told her. “I seem to have some talent, anyway,” I finished. “As hallucinations go, that's a pretty impressive piece of work.” I must have manufactured it deep in my subconscious—with most of it bearing a suspicious resemblance to things Gunnar Kelso had said.

“But it
does
make sense in a way. There's an arc, right?” Lisa traced a curve in the air with her forefinger. “They started by scaring you—let you know they could fry your brain if they wanted. But they didn't. Instead, they reminded you that you stopped it once. Brought that around to the Gatekeepers. Then—”